Mark Danner, a writer for The New Yorker and professor at Berkeley and Bard, delivered this insightful commencement address to
graduates of the Department of Rhetoric at Zellerbach Hall, University
of California, Berkeley, on May 10, 2007.
Excerpt:
When most of you arrived on this campus, in September 2003, the
rhetorical construction known as the War on Terror was already two
years old and that very real war to which it gave painful birth, the
war in Iraq, was just hitting its half-year mark. Indeed, the Iraq War
had already ended once, in that great victory scene on the USS Abraham
Lincoln off the coast of San Diego, where the President, clad jauntily
in a flight suit, had swaggered across the flight deck and, beneath a
banner famously marked “Mission Accomplished,” had declared: “Major
combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United
States and our allies have prevailed.”Of the great body of rich material encompassed by my theme
today–“Words in a Time of War”–surely those words of George W. Bush
must stand as among the era’s most famous, and most rhetorically
unstable. For whatever they may have meant when the President uttered
them on that sunny afternoon of May 1, 2003, they mean something quite
different today, almost exactly four years later. The President has
lost control of those words, as of so much else.At first glance, the grand spectacle of May 1, 2003 fits handily
into the history of the pageantries of power. Indeed, with its banners
and ranks of cheering, uniformed extras gathered on the stage of that
vast aircraft carrier–a stage, by the way, that had to be turned in a
complicated maneuver so that the skyline of San Diego, a few miles off,
would not be glimpsed by the television audience–the event and its
staging would have been quite familiar to, and no doubt envied by, the
late Leni Riefenstahl (who, as filmmaker to the Nazis, had no giant
aircraft carriers to play with). Though vast and impressive, the May 1
extravaganza was a propaganda event of a traditional sort, intended to
bind the country together in a second precise image of victory–the
first being the pulling down of Saddam’s statue in Baghdad, also
staged–an image that would fit neatly into campaign ads for the 2004
election. The President was the star, the sailors and airmen and their
enormous dreadnought props in his extravaganza.However ambitiously conceived, these were all very traditional
techniques, familiar to any fan of Riefenstahl’s famous film
spectacular of the 1934 Nuremberg rally, Triumph of the Will.
As trained rhetoricians, however, you may well have noticed something
different here, a slightly familiar flavor just beneath the surface. If
ever there was a need for a “disciplined grasp” of the “symbolic and
institutional dimensions of discourse”–as your Rhetoric Department’s
website puts it–surely it is now. For we have today an administration
that not only is radical–unprecedentedly so–in its attitudes toward
rhetoric and reality, toward words and things, but is willing, to our
great benefit, to state this attitude clearly.I give you my favorite quotation from the Bush Administration, put
forward by the proverbial “unnamed Administration official” and
published in the New York Times
magazine by the fine journalist Ron Suskind in October 2004. Here, in
Suskind’s recounting, is what that “unnamed Administration official”
told him:“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the
reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that
solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I
nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and
empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works
anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we
create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality–
judiciously, as you will–we’ll act again, creating other new
realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort
out. We’re history’s actors…. and you, all of you, will be left to
just study what we do.'”I must admit to you that I love that quotation; indeed, with your
permission, I would like hereby to nominate it for inscription over the
door of the Rhetoric Department, akin to Dante’s welcome above the
gates of Hell, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”